Sepp Blatter's authorization of a payment to fellow FIFA executive Michel Platini without a written contract was a "classic conflict of interest," FIFA's financial compliance head told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

October 20, 2015

ZURICH (AP) — Sepp Blatter's authorization of a payment to fellow FIFA executive Michel Platini without a written contract was a "classic conflict of interest," FIFA's financial compliance head told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Audit and compliance committee chairman Domenico Scala said that FIFA president Blatter could be culpable of "falsification" of accounts over the 2011 payment of 2 million Swiss francs (about $2 million) to Platini.

Platini, the president of UEFA, said the money was owed from his job as an adviser to Blatter between 1998 and 2002, but there was only a verbal agreement for the debt.

"Both parties, the president and Mr. Platini should have rescued from their positions because both are members of the executive committee of FIFA and they both have a conflict of interest," Scala told the AP in the first public comments on the case by a FIFA insider, other than Blatter and Platini.

Scala is also head of the ad-hoc election committee which rules on the eligibility of presidential candidates, but he has no say in the ethics case.

Blatter last week said he had a "gentleman's agreement" with Platini over the payment.

"If it is true what they are saying that they had an oral agreement at the time they made the written contract to defer the payment, that payment should have been recorded in the accounts in 2002 and subsequent years," Scala said. "It has not. If you approve as a member of a supervisory board financial accounts which you know that 2 million are not accrued you have possibly done a falsification of a document.